We are anxiously waiting on the weather here but seedlings are coming along nicely indoors! Your garden looks fantastic - I would like to put in raspberries but I think the Bears would get them all before me!

Hey Leigh, see you've sprouted those heirloom paste tomatoes. I've got 4 plants started in the basement right now too. Will be interesting to see how they work for us. Your garden is going so strong this early. I lust after those homegrown strawberries! Up here it's only 36F this morning. More low nighttime temps of the same for the next week. Never got past 45F yesterday. Very depressing. Ah well, your pic sure perked me up. :-D

I'm road building. Only the self sowers and the fruit bushes will be giving me anything for a while. Set a good crop of blackcurrants, black gooseberries, josta berries and Orus 8 blackcurrant/gooseberry crosses. Raspberries are just sending up canes and blueberries are beginning to flower. Arugula is everywhere. The bees are doing their job. Yea! We had to be re-queened because the bees were getting very aggressive. My keeper got 4 or more stings every visit!

Kris, yes, I got about a dozen of those paste tomatoes and am really looking forward to trying them. Strawberries this year are divine! I hope your temps warm up soon. And I hope ours don't. :) I never welcome those upper 90s of summer.

Road building sounds like you're about back to normal! Yay! All your fruit plantings sound wonderful. Can't have too much fruit. And sometimes big projects take priority over smaller garden things. It's just that way.

I'm in the process of requeening one of my hives too. But for the opposite reason! Hoping to have a post on that in a couple of days.

Leigh - your garden looks beautiful!!! i have 52 tomatoes and 28 peppers in the greenhouse in the house - all of the tomatoes are up and going strong, the peppers are taking their sweet time - no matter tho, because we have 13 pepper plants that we overwintered in the house and they have already started to flower - woohoo! i have a bunch of herbs, brassicas, spinaches and lettuces coming up in the out door greenhouse. we transplanted a bunch of brassicas that we overwintered in the outdoor greenhouse. also planted outdoors was garlic and year old carrots that we plan to let go to seed. tomorrow is another day and there will be more planting - peas and onions, radishes and beets. that's about it. again - your garden is beautiful and gives me inspiration!

Oh Leigh, you are so far ahead of us in your gardening season! I just took the mulch off our strawberries, garlic and asparagus within the last couple of days. Still finding frozen water on the poultry dishes in the morning and although we're getting a bit more sun, it's still not very warm. Maybe reaching the low 50s on a good day. But our time is coming. It really is!!

We started out with a small garden this year. We bought the plants already growing in small mesh "pots" that you just put in the hole when you plant. Not practical for anything large scale but this is just a trial voyage for us.

Harry, what a great trial voyage! I sincerely hope it's a huge success. There's nothing finer than eating food you've grown yourself. I love those plantable pots. I think the plants do better because they don't go though any shock.

Looks awesome. One helpful hint, though...leave your garlic until the tops start to brown and die back. This will usually be late June or even July. Earlier than that and you will get a lot smaller garlic.

Good advice. The only thing I would add is to focus on the "start to turn" and not wait until the leaves are completely brown and died back. It's a lot harder to find it all when that happens. Ask me how I know. ;)

5 Acres & A Dream. The dream has always been to live close to the land. The 5 acres came in 2009, when my husband Dan and I bought a neglected 1920s-built bungalow on 5 acres. The goal is simpler, sustainable, more self-reliant living, and a return to agrarian values.

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"I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.

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